Support of path changes with resource reservations for mobile hosts in IP-based access networks

The increasing use of wireless networks and the popularity of multimedia applications, leads to the need of QoS (quality of service) support in a mobile IP-based environment. This paper considers the reservation of resources in the micromobility scenario. The reasons for path changes in the access network are investigated. Based upon this, we present the functionality that should be present in the different access network elements to support path changes regardless their cause and to avoid router inconsistencies. For the simulations we added this functionality to our previously developed Q-MEHROM handoff scheme (L. Peters et al., 2005). However, the ideas and results presented in this paper are not restricted to this micromobility protocol